The 14-year-old will on Tuesday leave Afghanistan for the first time and take his first plane trip as he and co-star Jawanmard Paiz head to Hollywood.

The film which has taken Fawad's life on such an unexpected diversion is a 28-minute coming-of-age saga called Buzkashi Boys, made by an American and Canadian film-making pair who are based in Afghanistan.

In the movie, Fawad and Jawanmard, also 14, play friends who are desperate to emulate the heroic riders they worship who play Buzkashi, a tough Afghan sport which is like a violent version of polo where horsemen tussle over the carcass of a goat in a chaotic melee.

The success of the film, nominated against four competitors in the Best Live Action Short Film category, means Fawad will soon be rubbing shoulders with the likes of Denzel Washington, Naomi Watts and Anne Hathaway.

More than 7,000 miles away from Hollywood, he was last week unsure what to expect at the Oscars because he has never even seen the showbiz pageant on television.

"My family and friends are so happy and so excited about the Oscars. I have never watched it on television, I have only seen some photos.

"They don't show it here, only on cable TV. It's just the rich who can watch it," he told The Sunday Telegraph.

If he comes across film stars though, he has a list of people he is desperate to meet. "I really want to meet Rambo," he said. "Maybe Angelina Jolie, too."

The two boys have been measured for suits for their big night, and as part of their two week trip to America they will also visit Washington DC and have been promised a visit to Disneyland.

Seven years ago, such a trip would have seemed as unlikely as a trip to the Moon. Fawad's father struggled to support six sons and one daughter while only earning around £1.50 a day as a building labourer.

Fawad still sells maps on the streets, a trade he used to make a living as a small child (AP)

Sending children to school, rather than to work, is often an unaffordable luxury for families like theirs and so at seven Fawad decided to see what he could earn in Chicken Street.

The street, lined with trinket shops and carpet showrooms, has attracted the city's foreign visitors since the 1960s and is home to a ragtag army of child beggars and hustlers. Fawad's speciality was selling tourist maps bought for $1 (65p) and sold for $5 or more each.

"Sometimes the foreigners were very generous, but sometimes I made nothing," he said. "The number of foreigners has gone down too. It's not like it was five years ago."

His situation became more difficult when his father died, leaving him and his brothers to support the family alone. Yet even at this time he said he felt he was destined for something more. "I thought I would be famous somehow, but not like this. I thought maybe I would be a doctor or an engineer."

A foreign woman began paying for him to have an education at a private school in Kabul, several years ago, but he still spent much of his time hanging out at chicken Street trying to sell maps.

It was a meeting with director Sam French and producer Ariel Nasr that led to his current brush with fame.

Mr French was another of the foreigners in Kabul who had fond memories of the smiling map salesman on Chicken Street.

When he began to develop the plot of a film about Buzkashi-mad young boys, it was Fawad who came to mind.

The film is the first shot in Afghanistan that has been nominated for an Oscar

Fawad was chosen to star in a brief trailer to raise funding and when that was successful, he got the part of Rafi: a blacksmith's son whose father wants him to forsake his dreams of Buzkashi to take over the family forge.

Mr French, a Philadelphia native who has lived in Afghanistan for several years, said he had wanted to make the film as a way of training Afghans who aspired to work in the industry and also to capture the dramatic beauty of the Afghan capital.

He said: "It was our hope that it would show another side of the city that you don't see on the news." Fawad credits Mr French with helping him overcome his nerves when he started acting.

He said: "It was very difficult at first. How can a boy act whose family are not actors and who is from the street? It was so hard, but I worked hard and Sam was my teacher." If Fawad is a novice actor from an unlikely film star background, then his co-star Jawanmard is the opposite. The son of a well-known Afghan actor, he first appeared on film at the age of two-and-a-half and directed his own feature at the age of seven.

Due to a twist of casting it is he who plays the role of Ahmad, the street boy.

With film running through his blood, Jawanmard is certain he wants to make his career in the movies. But Fawad is less sure what he will do when he returns from the bright lights of Hollywood.

"I would like to make more films if someone would like to put me in them. But what I have wanted to do for a long time is to be a pilot," he said.

Afghanistan has its own struggling domestic film industry, but Buzkashi Boys is believed to be the first international co-production shot on location in Kabul for decades.

Other films set in the country, such as 2007's The Kite Runner, have used locales as varied as Western China and North Africa to double for the Afghan capital.

Jawanmard and Fawad both hope that their film can now show the wider appeal of Afghanistan beyond the battlefield depicted in films such as the Oscar-nominated Zero Dark Thirty about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Jawanmard says he has already begun preparing his acceptance speech to make just that point. He said: "We want to show that Afghans are not terrorists. We want to show that Afghanistan is a cultural country."